Testing Cron on Heroku

Deploying cron to Heroku is really…pleasant. Click “Daily” or “Hourly” cron and without any tedious setup of scripts, ensuring output is logged, or referring to CronWTF. Testing it though, is a pain! No longer should this be the case.

Cron is serious business.

Outside of Heroku, splitting up daily and hourly cron tasks is easy: just have a script/cron_hourly and script/cron_daily in your Rails app, and have fun configuring that on your server. On Heroku, it’s handled in one Rake task. Here’s an example from the Dev Center:

desc "This task is called by the Heroku cron add-on"
task :cron => :environment do
  if Time.now.hour % 4 == 0 # run every four hours
    puts "Updating feed..."
    NewsFeed.update
    puts "done."
  end

if Time.now.hour == 0 # run at midnight
    User.send_reminders
  end
end

Two things stand out here. First, checking for hourly/daily tasks is done by looking at Time.now. Second, that’s a lot of logic to put in a Rake task, and not write a test!

We’ve talked about testing Rake integration before, and we’re going to use a similar pattern here: extract the Rake task into a model. For Radish, our Rakefile now has:

desc "Run cron job"
task :cron => :environment do
  Cron.run
end

Our Cron class now has to handle the daily and hourly tasks. For now, this is all done in the run class level method. For Radish, the method has to:

• Archive data hourly for our new historical graphs
• Activate accounts daily, which will prevent a reminder email from being sent out.

The test

I ended up just using RSpec to test this out. Timecop helps with freezing time in the right place, and Bourne gives us test spies to make sure the right methods get called. Here’s the test I ended up with:

require 'spec_helper'

describe Cron do
  before do
    Account.stubs(:activate)
    Archive.stubs(:store)
  end

  let!(:project1) { Factory(:project) }
  let!(:project2) { Factory(:project) }

  after do
    Timecop.return
  end

  it "runs nightly" do
    Timecop.freeze(Time.now.midnight)
    Cron.run

    Account.should have_received(:activate)
    Archive.should_not have_received(:store)
  end

  it "runs hourly" do
    now = Time.now.midnight + 1.hour
    Timecop.freeze(now)
    Cron.run

    Account.should_not have_received(:activate)
    Archive.should have_received(:store).with(project1, now, now - 1.hour)
    Archive.should have_received(:store).with(project2, now, now - 1.hour)
  end
end

Let’s start from the top of the test here. The before block uses Bourne to stub out the two class level methods on other models in the application, so we can assert they were called later. We then hook up two let! blocks for two projects, which we will use later. let! as opposed to let in RSpec will force those blocks to be evaluated for each test run instead of being lazy evaluated when they are referenced. Finally, since we’re going to freeze time for each test, we have to return to the system time in the after block.

Our two tests verify our daily and hourly scenarios. The first freezes time at midnight, which may not be exactly when Heroku runs our cron job, but all we care about is that the daily task runs only once. The hourly test freezes time at 1:00AM and checks that only the hourly task gets run, and not the daily.

I could have gone a little more gung-ho on this test, perhaps running through an entire 24 hours and making sure the daily task was only called once, but this was good enough.

The implementation

Here’s what I ended up with in my Cron model:

class Cron
  def self.run
    now = Time.now

    Project.find_each do |project|
      Archive.store(project, now, now - 1.hour)
    end

    if now.hour == 0
      Account.activate
    end
  end
end

The implementation ended up to be pretty simple: grab the time, archive always (since the task is run hourly), and if it’s run in the 12:00AM hour, activate accounts.

Pushing this code down into a model makes more sense now…too much code that deals with models and not test data or factories in a Rake task always smells a bit funky to me. It’s also much easier to refactor the code now that we’re in a real model and we have a testing feedback loop in place. For instance, the Project.find_each loop could easily be extracted into the Project class.

Hacking your time zone

During this process I learned of a UNIX trick that can help with testing this locally: the TZ flag. The appropriately named UNIX Power Tools puts it best:

The TZ environment variable is a little obscure, but it can be very useful. It tells UNIX what time zone you’re in.

Most of the time scripts will get this from your environment, but you can override it. Here’s a simple way to test this:

% TZ=UTC+5 ruby -e "puts Time.now"
2011-07-05 11:30:48 -0500

% TZ=UTC-8 ruby -e "puts Time.now"
2011-07-06 00:30:42 +0800

% TZ=UTC ruby -e "puts Time.now"
2011-07-05 16:30:53 +0000

So basically, if you want to force it to be midnight when running a test or from a small script, you can use this environment variable to add/subtract time from your current time zone.

Less of a pain

Testing cron is now actually feasible, and now you can be assured your task will work without waiting an entire hour or day to find out. Which of course, means you can ship it faster!